Seattle has a social problem: the Seattle Freeze. The Seattle Freeze is a trait where people in Seattle are polite but not friendly. Seattlites will have conversations, hold doors, be friendly to your face, and it seems like you’re making an in road to a new friend…and then they fall off the edge of the Earth. Seattle has a reputation for being one of the hardest cities to make actual friends.
Alex (Adam Scott) and Emily (Tayor Schilling) have moved from Seattle to Los Angeles with their very young son, RJ. At the beginning of The Overnight, Alex is worried about making friends as an adult, pondering if he should ask somebody “do you want to be friends?” At first, their plan to make friends at a children’s birthday party that RJ has been invited to seems like a bust, but then RJ makes friends with Max through a bag of gummy worms, leading Max’s father Kurt (Jason Schwartzman) to invite Alex and Emily over for pizza.
Alex and Emily are bound and determined to try out a new mode of socialization. They want to move away from the Seattle Freeze to what could be termed the California Ease. Their idea of the California Ease is to go with whatever comes their way. Alex and Emily see Kurt and his wife, Charlotte (Judith Godrèche), as embodiments of the California/European way of life. They live in an expensive Euro-styled mansion, make homemade pizza, burn incense and humidify Max’s room for the sleepover without being overprotective. Kurt and Charlotte are hip, modern, worldly (read: European), rich, artsy, and free in all the ways that Alex and Emily seem uptight.
This devotion to the California Ease gets Alex and Emily through some odd initial bumps, such as Charlotte putting her hand on Alex’s knee while Kurt serenades Max and RJ to sleep or Kurt putting on Charlotte’s latest video, a breast pump demonstration video. When the large glass bong is finally pulled out, the whole evening is finally thrown into gear.
Writer-Director Patrick Brice (Creep) is intent on pushing the envelope to see where his characters will take him. Throughout the evening, insecurities and shortcomings keep popping up with an appropriate amount of pathos and seriousness but never deter from the outrageous humor. The Overnight works best when Brice keeps things bubbling instead of pushing. With a running time under 80 minutes, Brice still finds the time to have a techno and strobe light dance party and a surprise trip outside of the house for an “alcohol run,” the only two misfires in an otherwise hilarious and human bottle episode.
Actually, there is one more misfire, albeit more forgivable: the use of prosthetic penii in Brice’s extensive scenes of full-frontal male nudity. Kurt and Charlotte have a pool, so they eventually invite Alex and Emily to skinny dip with them. Both Jason Schwartzman and Adam Scott strip down, but they have rather obvious rubber prosthetic dildos on display instead of their actual units. Brice’s script places emotional beats on penis comparison, creating even more emphasis on the genitalia, which makes the use of prosthetics even more unfortunate. Here’s the thing: in American cinema, we rarely give women fake rubber breasts or fake vulvas when they have to appear naked. Giving both Schwartzman and Scott rubber genitals doesn’t push any envelopes, and also doesn’t create equality through explicit nudity. If they couldn’t fulfill that characteristic of their respective characters, either new actors could have been found, or the plot point changed.
These are minor condemnations in a short bullet of a movie that is lewd, humane, and hilarious. The characters are recognizable, relatable, and complex, though Adam Scott struggles with how to create the perfect Seattle Freeze. Brice constantly asks the audience, “how far would you go?”, a legitimate question as he clearly intends Alex and Emily to be the audience surrogates. The real questions for all involved is “what is healthy?” and “how do you make adult friends?” Or, maybe Kurt is just selling Amway water filters…